Aktivitet: From an Active Concept to an Active Exhibition

• In Event: Yugoslav Aesthetics II: Surrealism’s Uncharted Territory: The Belgrade 13, and Counting

Abstract

This paper will focus on the principle of “aktivitet”, a theoretical hybrid of Hegelian dialectic, Freudian psychoanalysis and vernacular thought, conceptualised and lived by the Belgrade Surrealist Group. The paper will address the modes in which this concept was embodied in the interwar, war, and postwar aesthetic production of the members of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle and zoom in on the following question: how to reassess, rearticulate, and indeed “activate” one such concept in the charged public space of an exhibition? What general and specific circumstances—opportunities, barriers, and memory-work—govern the operationalization of this concept in the context of Serbian society today? What relevance the concept and the efforts to animate it may have for all of us?

Author

• Sanja Bahun, U of Essex (UK)